NASA's Horizons Spacecraft To Probe Pluto Moon For Underground Ocean 47
An anonymous reader writes NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is moving towards Pluto to explore Charon, one of Pluto's moons. The aim of the mission is to search of evidence of an ancient underground ocean on the moon. "Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon's interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved," said Alyssa Rhoden of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "By comparing the actual New Horizons observations of Charon to the various predictions, we can see what fits best and discover if Charon could have had a subsurface ocean in its past, driven by high eccentricity."
KSP (Score:4, Insightful)
Orbit each planet.
Land a probe on each planet.
Land a probe on each moon.
Bring back samples from each location.
Colonize.
Until we do all those, we are cavemen with delusions of grandeur.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's plenty of water in Africa. You haven't actually been there, have you?
I have. I've seen what what's there on the ground. There are endless well-drilling, housing, and food projects funded by the western world, and each one is a success. The problem is the local corruption and lack of rule of law. No matter how much established nations invest in the area, local corruption will un-do and destroy.
If you have a proposal for how NASA can fix this problem, I'm all ears.